Tech

RICHLAND, Wash. – Natural gas extracted from the nation's coal beds and methane-rich geologic features must first be purged of hydrogen sulfide before it can be used as fuel. Until now, processing methods have often proved to be inefficient, requiring large amounts of heat.

The development of a new measurement technology under a research project funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation is probing the structure of composite and biological materials.

"Our results have provided some of the first microscopic insights into a sixty year old puzzle about the way polymeric networks react to repeated shear strains," said Dr. Daniel Blair, Assistant Professor, and principal investigator of the Soft Matter Group in the Department of Physics at Georgetown University.

MIAMI – March 10, 2011 -- Scientists from the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science were part of a national research team to find two plumes of oil-based pollutants downwind of the BP Deep Water Horizon oil spill. In a study published in this week's issue of the journal Science, the research team offers new insight into the mechanism by which the crude oil traveled from the sea surface to the atmosphere.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Man's best friend may provide more than just faithful companionship: A new study led by a Michigan State University researcher shows people who owned and walked their dogs were 34 percent more likely to meet federal benchmarks on physical activity.

The results, said epidemiologist Mathew Reeves, show that promoting dog ownership and dog walking could help many Americans – of which fewer than half meet recommended levels of leisure-time physical activity – become healthier.

During a special airborne mission to study the air-quality impacts of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill last June, NOAA researchers discovered an important new mechanism by which air pollution particles form. Although predicted four years ago, this discovery now confirms the importance of this pollution mechanism and could change the way urban air quality is understood and predicted.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Technophiles who have been dreaming of mobile devices that run longer on lighter, slimmer batteries may soon find their wish has been granted.

University of Illinois engineers have developed a form of ultra-low-power digital memory that is faster and uses 100 times less energy than similar available memory. The technology could give future portable devices much longer battery life between charges.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Researchers are using a new model to learn more about how toe strength can determine how far people can lean while keeping their balance.

The results could help in building robotic body parts that will closely imitate human movement, and might lead to a new generation of advanced prosthetics.

Hooshang Hemami, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State University built a complex computational model of the human foot to look at the role of the feet and toes in determining the body's movement and balance.

Referring patients to hospitals that have the largest volume of surgical procedures does not necessarily lead to improved outcomes for the overall population, according to the results of a new study in the February issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.

Montreal, QC —March 10, 2011 —In childhood, boys and girls tend to form friendships almost exclusively with same-sex peers. Around early adolescence, they gradually begin to include other-sex friends in their network. A new study published in Journal of Research on Adolescence suggests that girls and boys experience this transition very differently. The findings show that girls tend to initiate the transition to a mixed-gender friendship network earlier than boys, and continue this transition at a faster pace during adolescence.

A new study conducted by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center and Yale School of Medicine shows that when hospitals acquire surgical robotic technology, men in that region are more likely to have prostate cancer surgery. The study, "The Association between Diffusion of the Surgical Robot and Radical Prostatectomy Rates", was published this week in the online edition of the journal Medical Care.

What are the characteristics that a video game must have to be entertaining? Why do players prefer some video games to others? What is the difference between a game and an educational multiplayer video game? All these questions were answered by a research carried out by José Luís González Sánchez and conducted by professor Francisco Luís Gutiérrez Vela at the Department of Languages and Computering of the University of Granada.

How fast an intense laser pulse can change the electrical properties of solids is revealed by researchers from Kiel University in the current edition of Nature (09.03.2011). Scientists in the team of Professor Michael Bauer, Dr. Kai Roßnagel and Professor Lutz Kipp from the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics, together with colleagues from the University of Kaiserslautern and the University of Colorado in Boulder, U.S.A., are following the course of electronic switching processes which occur within fractions of a second (femtoseconds).

Los Angeles, CA (March 10th, 2011) – A review of research carried out over 20 years suggests that UK doctors appear to consistently oppose euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS). The findings - which appear in the latest issue of the journal Palliative Medicine, published by SAGE - highlight a gap between doctors' attitudes and those of the UK public.

BOULDER, Colo.—Physicists at the NationalInstitute of Standards and Technology (NIST)have demonstrated an electromechanicalcircuit in which microwaves communicate witha vibrating mechanical component 1,000 timesmore vigorously than ever achieved before insimilar experiments. The microscopicapparatus is a new tool for processinginformation and potentially could control themotion of a relatively large object at thesmallest possible, or quantum, scale.